Wyse Z90D7: Mods

Mods

When I got the email from Mal from Manchester I decided to add yet another tab (this one) rather than tack it on to the stuff in 'using'. I subsequently heard from Alex and Dan who also decided to add a second ethernet port to their Z90D7s. You'll find their take on the necessary metal bashing here.

In March 2021 I heard from Jacek from Poland. He had been investigating how easy it was to utilise the PCIe connector used by the 'E' version of the hardware. You'll find his contribution below.

Adding PCIe interface

Wyse Z90DE In March 2021 I heard from Jacek from Poland. A while ago he had bought a Z90D7 to experiment with and wondered about possibly turning it into a NAS box. Ideally he wanted the larger 'E' version for this as this it had extra space for mounting stuff along with a PCIe interface for an expansion card. (BTW The 'E' in Z90DE7 stands for 'extended'). These appear to be extremely rare beasts.

Back in July 2019 I had heard from 'Wacco' who actually had one and who reported that the CN108 and CN109 provided the connections across to the PCIe interface in the 'E' half.

Jacek wrote:

Wyse Z90D7 CN108 connector Being unable to get hold of an 'E' version of the Z90 or even any details on the expansion connector other than that it supported a 4x PCIe channels I decided to investigate.

I was interested in the PCI-e ribbon cable connector (CN108), which, according to the manufacturer, could be broken out into a PCI-e 4x slot.

Wyse Z90D7 PCIe: breakout board I salvaged a 40-pin flat flex cable and connector from an old laptop and soldered it to a simple breakout board. This meant I could probe and solder to the connector easily.

Wyse Z90D7 PCIe: prototype board After a bit of poking around with a multimeter, a resistor and an oscilloscope I was fairly certain where all the signals were, so I tried soldering a PCI-e 1x connector on an extension cable to see if it would work. (BTW, at this stage I didn't bother soldering 12V power as this was just a test).

Wyse Z90D7 PCIe: test with nvme board To be honest, I kind of expected it to not work - PCI-e cabling should have things like matched track lengths, both signals of a pair should be close together, etc. This generic adapter and my hand soldering probably wreaks havoc on the signal quality. However the adapter actually works!

In the pictures you can see I tried plugging in an NVMe drive as I that was just what happened to be on hand.

Wyse Z90D7 PCIe: test with nvme board The device is detected in lspci, lsblk and I can even write some stuff to it and read it back.

Subsequently I added a 12V supply to the PCIe connector and successfully tested a Gigabyte network card and a USB 3.0 interface card.

The test setup is shown above.

The connector pin-out can be seen here (Excel file).

This adapter is just a proof of concept, but I'm thinking of designing a custom PCB that would have properly routed tracks, a separate connector for 12V power, maybe some extra capacitors or a separate power supply for 3.3V so the little flat flex wires don't have to handle much current.... We'll see.

You can find the draft of the adapter board here. Please note that at the time of writing this is untested.

I hope you find this as interesting as I did :)

Cheers!

Jacek from Poland